A bull was grazing near a bull calf.  The bull contemplatively chewed his cud and then spoke about how much he loved the pasture.  It was rich, green, with deep roots.

The bull calf disagreed.  The grass was greener on the other side of the fence, he said.

The bull examined the rank, brown, patchy grass in the wildlands outside and asked the bull calf what he could possibly  mean.

The bull calf replied that a crow had told him that the founder of their herd had eaten too much alfalfa once and almost died of bloat.  The same crow had said that founder had also got into a bloody fight with a cougar.

The cougar was attacking the herd, the bull replied.

The bull calf replied that whenever he tried to voice his honest concerns the herd replied defensively and with excuses like the bull had just done, and that was his final reason for thinking the grass was greener on the other side.

Moral: the spirit and the fruits are the proof you  need

WORDS by Dana Gioia

The world does not need words. It articulates itself
in sunlight, leaves, and shadows. The stones on the path
are no less real for lying uncatalogued and uncounted.
The fluent leaves speak only the dialect of pure being.
The kiss is still fully itself though no words were spoken.

And one word transforms it into something less or other—
illicit, chaste, perfunctory, conjugal, covert.
Even calling it a kiss betrays the fluster of hands
glancing the skin or gripping a shoulder, the slow
arching of neck or knee, the silent touching of tongues.

Yet the stones remain less real to those who cannot
name them, or read the mute syllables graven in silica.
To see a red stone is less than seeing it as jasper—
metamorphic quartz, cousin to the flint the Kiowa
carved as arrowheads. To name is to know and remember.

The sunlight needs no praise piercing the rainclouds,
painting the rocks and leaves with light, then dissolving
each lucent droplet back into the clouds that engendered it.
The daylight needs no praise, and so we praise it always—
greater than ourselves and all the airy words we summon.

(more…)

God is divisive.

God divided the light from the darkness. (Genesis 1)

Nephi’s describes his father’s dream, which includes “the awful gulf which separates the wicked from the tree of life.” Nephi comments that his father “saw that the justice of God did also divide the wicked from the righteous.” (1 Nephi 15)

Towards the end of his reign, Nephi concluded, “For the time speedily cometh that the Lord God shall cause a great division among the people, and the wicked will he destroy.”

In the last days, Christ will divide his people like a shepherd divides his sheep from his goats. (Matthew 25)

Behold, I am God; give heed to my word, which is quick and powerful, sharper than a two-edged sword, to the dividing asunder of both joints and marrow; therefore, give heed unto my word.

(D&C 12)

God is divisive.  He will divide and divide and divide. He doesn’t want you to end up on the other side of the divide. He doesn’t want anybody to. But he will divide. You can’t stop it anymore than you can stop the Mississippi rolling, nor should you want to. Let God divide.

—

There is a puzzle in Lehi’s dream, little remarked on, that I think I have solved. The answer is continuing revelation.

The puzzle has to do with the river of water and the fountain from which they come.

(more…)

I keep  meaning to use Lehi’s Dream as an interpretive lens for the parts of the Book of Mormon we are reading now.  I had this bit about the Nephite journey ending in Jacob revealing the name of Christ-symbolically finding Christ–and another bit about Father Lehi dying and wondering if that was the end of his long journey through the dark wilderness or if it was just the beginning–but instead I keep coming back to the dream itself.

On Sunday a speaker quoted Paul on charity.  Paul says that revelation without charity is nothing.

And though I have the gift of ^aprophecy, and understand all ^bmysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.

One interpretation of the Iron Rod/the Word of God is that it is revelation, not just scripture.  I think that is the best interpretation.  But the Word is another name for Christ.   Revelation is not just a guide to Christ.  It is an experience of him.

We tend to think of revelation as a set of instructions to achieve a goal.  Often it is.  But that is the least important part of revelation.  The main thing is the presence of God that fills you with light and love.

We think of the gift of charity as loving others, and it is, but that is secondary to experiencing the love of God where your love for them and their love for you overflow and bounce back and forth and mingle and you can no longer tell where one begins and the other ends.  The love for others is a result of that.

Perhaps the difference between the two different types of those who hold on to the Iron Rod is that the one group treats it just as a set of instructions for getting to the tree, and for the other group the Rod is the Tree, they experience them all over and over again in a cycle of enjoying to the end, and they fall down when they get to the Tree because they recognize Him.

On the sweetness of Our life.

You make one of the last sessions at the old Provo Temple before it all comes down.  You have not been there since you were in college many years ago.  There are swarms of people.  It is a reverent  madhouse.  You could only wish that it were the old endowment to go with the old temple, for just this once.  When you come out at twilight, the lake and the mountains and the clouds mount up in layers of blue and purple behind the dim white of the fountain.

You meet with old friends.

You drive home directly to your stake conference.  Old friends there too.

The temples close annually for a couple weeks of deep cleaning and maintenance. Sometimes they close for a year or two of renovation. Very rare is for one of these buildings, which in their design and purpose point to eternity, to close and never open again. Saturday night the Provo Temple in Utah will close and never open again. Scheduling for the endowment rooms and baptistry for today (Thursday), Friday, and Saturday shows those spaces completely reserved.

After Saturday, the Provo Temple will be demolished, and to the west of where it will have formerly stood, the Provo Rock Canyon Temple will be erected.

Last April I was in Provo for BYU graduation ceremonies, and while I was in town I entered the Provo Temple one last time. I could not devote the hours to engage in ordinance work, but I stopped at the painted/sculpted mural of Jesus with the woman at Jacob’s well. After that I changed into white temple attire and went to the Celestial Room. After perhaps half an hour there, I continued to the floor with the sealing rooms and lingered another half hour. I had last been present in those spaces thirty-three years before, when I was finishing up as a BYU student.

I looked at the aged people around me who had been younger than my present age thirty-three years earlier. I thought of the aged people of that prior time, when I was young, who are now all dead.

I once noticed in the home of a friend a picture from her wedding day in 1993. There she was standing in front of the Provo Temple, which a year from now will only exist in pictures and memories and ordinances like hers.

The Golden Minute, Bruce Charlton’s latest characteristically winsome post, is crying out for a virtue chart.

On the one hand, “for just one time I would take the Northwest passage”–“this was their finest hour”–“better 50 years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay”

On the other hand, “masterful inaction”–wu-wei–“be still and know that I am God”–“the unexamined life is not worth living”

On the one hand, we’ve all had the unhappy experience of being listless and getting nowhere.  We all know energetic people who seem to accomplish much.

On the other hand, so many driven people seem to accomplish things that end up going nowhere.  They do a lot, but what they do doesn’t do anything.  Having goals doesn’t mean you have good goals.  For every Elon Musk, dozens of Jeff Bezos.

(more…)

A French movie, the Rules of the Game, Jean Renoir, was apparently panned by moviegoers and critics alike when it first came out. Since then it has acquired a reputation of being one of the best movies ever made.

It is terrible. The moviegoers and critics absolutely had the right of it. (more…)

Young G used to think that the chapter in 2 Nephi which is basically Yay Joseph Smith was embarrassing.   It felt like Joseph  Smith was making the whole thing up and felt the need to write his own reviews.

Older G as of last week finally realized that the Book of Mormon being for our day doesn’t exclusively mean 21st C America.   “Our day” is probably everything from 1830 or so on.  Therefore a lot of it is about the Saints and the Restoration.  Joseph and the friends needed the reassurance that they were part of foretold divine history to get them through the trials to come.

For those of you who have been at this party for years and wonder what took me so long, well, I’m just  happy to be here.

Sunday is like going to a retreat every week, or it should be.  If the calling does not permit it, the calling, or the way you perform it, ought to change.

21st Century Nephi: And lo we did travel without recipe apps, and cooked our meat without online instructions

Anecdote/Joke:  The kid is handing over the cash in a tithing envelope.

It’s for you, bishop.

Tithing or fast offerings?

It’s for you, Bishop.

But I don’t need the money, kiddo.

But my dad says you are one of the poorest bishops we’ve had.

On the sweetness of Mormon life–

you are traveling.  You stop in at a small branch on the edge of a small town.  The nearest congregation is 70 miles away.  The high councilman and his wife drove about 120 miles to be there.  The Branch President holds the service to introduce you to all 20 congregants, from about age 80 to about age 5.  When the service begins you weep from the presence of the Spirit.  The peace of God whose intensity passes your soul’s capacity to bear.

The people of God and the Holy Ghost.  The people of God and the Holy Ghost.

I highly recommend these books (in translation) and these movies (with subtitles on).   By Marcel Pagnol about his childhood in Provence.  Very warm and family-focused and even stylish.

The books in particular are good enough to become part of our read-aloud rotation.

Age wise, your family’s average age needs to be at least a few years older than for, say, Laura Ingalls Wilder.

And it came to pass that the Lord did warn me, that I, Nephi, should depart from them and flee into the wilderness, and all those who would go with me.

Wherefore, it came to pass that I, Nephi, did take my family, and also Zoram and his family, and Sam, mine elder brother and his family, and Jacob and Joseph, my younger brethren, and also my sisters, and all those who would go with me. And all those who would go with me were those who believed in the warnings and the revelations of God; wherefore, they did hearken unto my words.

And we did take our tents and whatsoever things were possible for us, and did journey in the wilderness for the space of many days. And after we had journeyed for the space of many days we did pitch our tents.

-2 Nephi 5.

Parts of the Book of Mormon were meant for our day,  meaning right now.  Parts were meant for the 1800s.  In particular, there are multiple exoduses described in the Book of Mormon.  Lehi’s family, Nephi’s group, and later the exodus to Zarahemla.  Even Lehi’s Dream begins with an exodus.

 All lovingly preserved for long centuries to prepare the Saints for their trek to Salt Lake.

The pioneers were one of the great works of God and his people, long prophesied and prepared for, and are rightly treated as such.

God shall give unto you knowledge by his Holy Spirit, yea, by the unspeakable gift of the Holy Ghost, that has not been revealed since the world was until now;

. . .  Nothing shall be withheld.  Whether there be one God or many gods, they shall be manifest.

All thrones and dominions, principalities and powers, shall be revealed and set forth upon all who have endured valiantly for the gospel of Jesus Christ.

-thus D&C 121

What is your heroic narrative?  For you surely have one, whether you know it or not.

The problem with delusions of grandeur is the delusions, not the grandeur.

Most heroic narratives fail by being insufficiently heroic.  Yours should be broader in scope, further in time, higher in height, than you dare to imagine.